Existing systems for transmitting electronic document images may lack the security and reliability desired by industries which utilize electronic document transmission, such as the banking industry, the health care industry, and the legal industry amongst others. For example, facsimile (fax) systems may not provide adequate security to be acceptable for sending private documents, confidential documents, or generally any documents for which privacy, confidentiality or security may be a concern. A sender of a fax may be unable to verify that the fax was delivered to the intended recipient without having been intercepted and/or viewed by intervening users. Furthermore, a sender of a fax may be unable to verify that the fax was actually received by the intended recipient. The sender may receive a confirmation that the fax was transmitted to a particular telephone number; however, due to the common practice of sharing fax machines in corporate environments or technical issues, e.g. that the machine is operating correctly or has sufficient paper, toner or ink, the sender may be unable to verify that the intended recipient received the fax.
Email or other electronic messaging systems may also be inadequate for transmitting documents for which privacy, confidentiality or security is a concern. For example, a fraudulent individual may obtain an email account and/or messaging service account using fraudulent information. The individual could use the email and/or messaging account to fraudulently send and/or receive electronic document images. Thus, email and messaging services may be undesirable for any electronic document image transmission requiring verification of the identity of the sending and/or receiving user as the users of these systems may not be assured of each other's identity. While some email systems may allow users to request a read receipt or a delivery receipt for an email, the read receipts and delivery receipts fail to confirm that the user who received the message was the intended recipient.
Furthermore, fax, email and other electronic messaging systems may provide little to no control to the sender of an electronic document image once the electronic document image is sent. Some email systems may allow a sender to recall a message, but this functionality is often limited and unreliable. Generally, messages sent in these systems are not controllable by the sending user, and the sending user may have no way of verifying whether the message was successfully delivered to the intended recipient.